‘God Particle’ a historic milestone from Higgs Boson hunters
Particle physicists Wednesday moved closer to unraveling the secrets of the universe with the preliminary results in the search for the long sought Higgs particle, also known as ‘God Particle”.

According to a statement from CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) Geneva, during a conference the ATLAS and CMS experiments presented their latest preliminary results of their research and both experiments observed a new particle in the mass region.

With the development, the CERN Director General Rolf Heuer said that they have reached a milestone in the understanding of nature. “The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs Boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle’s properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe,” said Rolf Heuer.

“We observe in our data clear signs of a new particle, at the level of 5 sigma, in the mass region around 126 GeV. The outstanding performance of the LHC and ATLAS and the huge efforts of many people have brought us to this exciting stage,” said ATLAS experiment spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti, “but a little more time is needed to prepare these results for publication.”

CERN Geneva statement said that positive identification of the new particle’s characteristics will take considerable time and data. But whatever form the Higgs particle takes, our knowledge of the fundamental structure of matter is about to take a major step forward.

The action took place at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) where scientists have been tirelessly engaged in finding how the universe that we live in started with a Big Bang.

The particle has been the subject of a 45-year hunt for explaining how matter attains its mass. The announcement of the results at CERN, home of the LHC in Geneva, was met with loud applause and cheers.

What is Higgs boson?
The Higgs boson was hunted so determinedly because it is believed to be the manifestation of an invisible field - the Higgs field that permeates through the entire universe.

According to the theory, Higgs boson was the agent that made the stars, planets - and life - possible by giving mass to most elementary particles, the building blocks of the universe; hence the nickname “God Particle.”

Considered the last ingredient of the ‘standard model’ of particle physics, the discovery of Higgs boson is expected to play a pivotal role in solving the fundamental questions about the formation of the universe.

Higgs boson gives the particles their mass. Without this mass, these particles would zip though the cosmos at the speed of light, unable to bind together to form the atoms that make up everything in the universe.

The field was posited in the 1960s by British scientist Peter Higgs, of University of Edinburgh, as the way that matter obtained mass after the universe was created in the Big Bang. Peter Higgs was personally present in Geneva when the discovery of the boson named after him was announced.

The experiment
The Higgs boson was discovered by smashing beams of protons - sub-atomic particles - together at close to the speed of light, recreating the conditions as it were a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

The protons were smashed inside the Large Hadron Collider, which is the largest and most complex machine ever made. It has a circumference of 27 km (17 miles) and lies underground, straddling French and Swiss territory.